Fighters’ Wives: The World Of MMA shows what it’s like to be a ringside sweetheart

A new TV show follows women who date cage fighters. Sharon Lougher meets the partners who tend wounds and face disapproving parents.

When it comes to the world of famous cage-fighting couples, most people would forgive you if your knowledge begins and ends with Alex Reid and his tabloid terror of an ex-wife. But not Sarah Beddoe. ‘It does annoy me when I say: “I’m dating a cage fighter” and Alex Reid and Jordan are the first thing somebody will say,’ laughs the well-spoken fashion sales worker, one of four cage fighter-dating women whose lives are chronicled in new behind-the-scenes Channel 5 documentary Fighters’ Wives: The World Of MMA.

‘Reid is not a bad fighter, he’s actually quite good,’ continues Beddoe, whose boyfriend, Brad Pickett, fought on the same Ultimate Fighting Championships shows as Reid. ‘But there are so many fighters better than him that don’t have the same kind of recognition. Though Brad speaks very highly of him.’ And what about Jordan? ‘I met her once – she was rude, really rude,’ laughs Beddoe. ‘She wasn’t interested.’

There are all sorts of family set-ups featured in Fighters’ Wives. Some of the fighters are up-and-comers, desperate to eke out a living for their kids, while wives and girlfriends range from the hands-off, like Beddoe, to cheerleaders and ringside GPs.

Beddoe and Pickett make for an unlikely couple: he is a cockney from Bethnal Green; she went to a posh Catholic boarding school in Surrey. They met after she emailed him pretending she was a fan, expecting nothing more than a fun fling. They’ve now been together for seven years.

‘When you start seeing someone and your parents don’t approve, it isn’t easy,’ says Beddoe, who says she thought her parents probably hoped she’d be bringing home a ‘nice doctor or a rugby-playing lawyer’. ‘We stuck through it – they can see he has such hard-working ethics.’

Those hard-working ethics are strongly emphasised throughout Fighters’ Wives: fighters can spend four months preparing for one 25-minute fight. All those featured in the series are keen to emphasise that cage fighting is not a bloody, brawling, last-man-standing affair – the cage just serves as a contained arena for highly disciplined mixed martial arts tournaments, governed by tight rules. And thanks to the now mainstream appeal of organisations such as UFC, there are now more than 150 MMA clubs in Britain.

Paul McVeigh, an experienced MMA fighter, runs one of them. His students are stitched up by his doctor wife Maeve in her capacity as a ringside GP – though thanks to stringent fight rules, gruesome wounds caused by such manoeuvres as head-butting or eye-gouging, aren’t on her to-do list.

‘The most typical injury I deal with is probably a joint sprain, where perhaps someone has been in a joint lock and the joints have been stretched beyond the normal range of movement,’ says the cheery Glaswegian, who has known her husband since school. ‘And some cuts and bruises, usually either above or below the eyebrow.’ For Maeve, her husband’s passion is 24/7: prior to sorting out fight wounds, she’ll have endured his strict, protein-heavy diet regime. ‘Normal dinner isn’t really on the cards,’ she says, ruefully, ‘and neither is anything nice like biscuits and cakes.’

Pickett and McVeigh represent only a tiny fraction of fighters who make any money from the sport – though cage fighting won’t make Sarah and Maeve kept women.

‘There was a moment about three years into dating Brad, when I was 26 or 27, and I was starting to panic about the future,’ admits Sarah. ‘I wanted to be supported by a husband, I wanted to be comfortable, and there was a worry that Brad wouldn’t provide that lifestyle.’

Maeve adds: ‘The thing that really breaks my heart is when I hear a really young guy saying: “I’ve given up my job because I want to be an MMA fighter.”’

Does she ever wish her hubby had a more lucrative hobby so she had the kind of spending power more akin to, say, Coleen Rooney?

‘Sometimes I think it would be lovely to not have to go to work and get your nails done and go out to lunch with friends and go shopping,’ she laughs. ‘But I think I would tire of that really quickly. I really love my work – I wouldn’t be able to do without it for very long.’